I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor. - Chris Christie, "An Open Letter to the Teachers of NJ" October, 2009

Monday, November 4, 2013

Christie's Never-Ending War On Teachers

When Chris Christie isn't yelling at individual teachers, he's busy bashing their unions (11/3/13, Newton, NJ):



(5:26) I will tell you, there are the forces that will always fight against us. You see it on TV every day. The folks who believe that the government and your tax dollars are their personal piggy bank to play with and to social engineer. We've got to send a strong message in the last three days, especially to the New Jersey Education Association. It is time to send a strong message.

Here the rubes who are actually working for this man applaud him. Poor suckers: they actually think he's going to cut their taxes. Hardly.

The fact is we all want great public schools and we're all willing to invest in them. I care about that and so do you.

That is a demonstrable lie. Christie has failed to meet his constitutional obligations and fully fund public schools, as required by law, four years in a row. The Supreme Court had to force him to fund schools in his first year; he then had the gall to run around and claim he was increasing school spending. Now the school funding gap is wider then ever.

And, on top of everything else, Christie has refused to say how he will pay to meet the eventual $5.5 billion in pension obligations he has now that his pen-ben "reforms" - which he touts every chance he gets - are in place. Meanwhile, health costs are skyrocketing, but he hasn't done anything to rein them in. I still haven't decided whether, on the issue of pensions and benefits, Christie is a liar, a fool, or both.

Given his incoherence and mendacity, what choice does Chris Christie have but to go after the NJEA? He certainly doesn't have a real plan to help the schools that serve our poorest children, let alone save our great schools that serve children not in poverty. And going after teachers satiates his increasingly apparent misogyny quite well.

Chris Christie goes after the NJEA because he is a fraud with no serious plans for the future other than running for president. Teachers and parents, you were warned: if this man wins on Tuesday, we are in for another four years of disgusting teacher and school bashing. Is that what you really want?


Four more years of this?

3 comments:

Giuseppe said...

In the next 4 years Christie will double down on charters and vouchers and he will probably find a way to renege on the pension promise. Gee, tough luck to all those NJ teachers who paid billions into the pension fund over the past 20 years. Christie eliminated the COLA for current and future retirees, he will probably try to blow up the pension fund as a favor to all his right wing paymasters like the Koch brothers. I sincerely hope a miracle happens on Tuesday and Barbara Buono wins in spite of all the DINOs who stabbed her in the back. She and Marie Corfield get my vote and respect for their courage and perseverance.

Unknown said...

Christie is corrupt to the core. Digby has mined the Time magazine expose on the Romney campaign to expose the reason Christie failed the vetting process as Romney's Veep choice:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-immature-bullyboy.html


"The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing."

Star-Ledger- what have you to say???

Unknown said...

Personal piggy bank? This from the swine who thought it was ok to use a state owned helicopter to tote him to his kid's baseball game and a state car to freight him the 100 yards from the landing spot to the actual game. Priceless.